Misguided use of microchip technology

Officials with Contra Costa County's Head Start program were frustrated. In order to meet federal requirements, they had to take attendance every hour.

These and other administrative tasks were taking up a lot of teachers' time - between one and three hours a day per teacher - and using up a lot of the program's limited funds.

We sympathize with their pain. An hourly attendance requirement is indeed burdensome, and it's a useless distraction from the very important work that Head Start does - preparing low-income preschoolers for school. But we can't support what those officials did next, which was to implement a microchip tracking program for those very young children.

The child-tracking initiative is called Child Location, Observation and Utilization Data System (CLOUDS). This summer, the first part of the system was installed at the George Miller III Center in Richmond, which provides free or reduced-cost child care under the federal Head Start program. About 200 students between the ages of 3 and 5 were assigned basketball jerseys that were embedded with the electronic locator chips. The idea is that the tracking devices are a quick way to take attendance. They also send signals to administrators whenever a child strays out of his or her assigned area.

Officials applied for - and received - the substantial amount of money it takes to create such a program (it cost $50,000 to set up the Miller site) from the federal stimulus act. We don't understand why the federal government agreed to this. If anything, this is a misuse of technology that federal officials should have stopped. But Contra Costa officials also should have done their homework on the history of these devices in California - and about the very real privacy and safety concerns that they've created.

In late 2004, there was a national uproar when a middle school in Sutter County required students to wear microchipped badges that allowed administrators to track them around campus. One of the many problems, as further research has shown, is that informed criminals can pick up on the information on those badges, too. That problem hasn't gone away.

"It's been proven time and time again by security researchers just how unsecure these chips are," said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director of the ACLU of Northern California. "The chips in this (Miller) program are high-powered chips with a read range of 100 meters away. That's the length of a football field."

The Sutter County disaster was one of the main reasons the state passed a 2007 law that banned forced implantation of microchips under a person's skin. But Contra Costa County officials didn't do their homework on these issues.

"In our opinion, that situation was very different, because they had all of the child's information on the microchip. We won't be doing that."

We're not comforted.

If the county didn't do its homework on these devices before it assigned them to students, we find it difficult to believe that they'll be able to ensure the security of these devices now that the students are wearing them. And, as Ozer said, "Parents shouldn't have to pay for Head Start with the privacy and safety of their preschoolers."

Contra Costa County officials should look for new ways to track attendance in the Head Start program, and federal officials should support them in doing that. (Better still would be for federal officials to drop the hourly attendance notation requirement altogether.)

But this isn't the right solution. The privacy and safety of these very young children must outweigh the inconvenience of their teachers.